> There is no "evil capitalist" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because

> There is no "evil capitalist" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because of the benefits. The economic forces overwhelm the ideals of the decentralized protocol. There is no "decentralized protocol" in git. Changes to history are local. You then convince a remote to accept your development history as truth. I feel that you must miss the point of git's distributed and decentralized nature to say that a popular service like GitHub is detrimental to its ideals. The sense in which git is decentralized is that in order to develop, you need a a full copy of the development history up until the point at which you want to contribute. You then create a history that is unique to you and maybe you push this to a remote at some point. Insofar that your history is shared, there is no difference between the repository at a remote (or an archive etc.) and the repository you and other developers have. Insofar that your history isn't shared, the workflow is entirely decentralized, enabling a distributed development process. Git isn't decentralized to satisfy some lofty ideal, but because this enables a convenient workflow. A side effect of this is of course that GitHub going down forever isn't the end of the world in terms of git, because anyone interested in the code probably has an somewhat up-to-date copy of the development history that they can push to another remote or continue working on for their own intents uninterrupted by such an event. But that's a side effect IMO and not the most valuable sense in which git is decentralized. The loss will primarily be in git non-goals like discoverability, issue tracking and facilitation of the pull request workflow that GitHub offers. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only things I'm placing bets on that may result in a loss to me if GitHub dies.